Is Alice‪?‬

Is Alice? is a powerful and fictionalised love story. The novel was written solely as a manuscript gift for my partner, and publication is therefore dependent upon her wishes. Her primary one, along with pleasure about its surprising publication, is anonymity. She is not “Alice,” and I am not “Theo.” This is not a biography. Fiction is used in Is Alice? to illuminate an actual madness along with a real search for the ideas that may help in understanding the living and political nature of consciousness – the structure of “normality” and the “real” world and its incoherent collapse into the hell that is known as schizophrenia. There are passages from the patient’s point of view, which make this novel an unusual project. That is because the inner landscape of madness does have a logic and meaning that should be acknowledged and evoked, instead of ridiculed or misunderstood. Contemporary psychology – nevermind clinical psychiatry – fails in its attempt to address the nature of consciousness or its creation of the “world.” I believe philosophy underpins psychology, not the other way around.